1. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates to decision-making processes where information is analyzed to provide an individual with one or more suggested solutions or actions. More specifically, the present invention relates to transferring and synchronizing medical data between a decision-making medical system and one or more mobile information devices used by clinicians, thereby aiding a clinician to more efficiently treat patients than is currently possible.
2. The Prior State of the Art
The U.S. health care delivery system has undergone breathtaking changes since the late 1980's. Escalating costs, diminishing resources, demands for accountability characterize today's medical marketplace, inescapable conflicts regarding meaningful outcomes measures, and an expanding medical knowledge base.
Health care is an information intensive industry and the delivery systems typically used within hospitals and clinics are drowning in data while starving for information. It is no exaggeration to describe the current health care delivery system as undergoing an information revolution. Increasingly providers and health care researchers experience demands for more accurate and accessible information. The complexity of health care, its burgeoning information base, and the turbulence of the medical marketplace have all contributed to a system grappling with methods to efficiently synthesize and disseminate information, standardize care, and to continue to create and innovate. The obstacles to these goals are the same regardless of whether the health care delivery entity is a small hospital, long-term/skilled nursing facility, medical clinic, home health agency, hospice, emergent care unit, or large institution. The frustrations and barriers are faced equally whether the affiliation is academic public or private, managed care or fee-for-service, not-for-profit or for profit. All entities are faced with the need to identify strategies and solutions to manage information and make better decisions, whether those decisions are medical or business-related in nature.
Of particular interest to the demands of the ever increasing need for more accurate and accessible information is the area of clinical decision-making. Clinical decisions are of particular interest since they often influence the balance of human suffering and well-being. Clinical decisions, not unlike all human decisions, are complex and influenced by many causal relationships. These relationships include the evidence-base of medicine, patient-physician factors and interactions, and external and internal constraints. Whether clinicians are serving individual patients or populations they have always sought to base their decisions on the best available evidence. This simple tenet has been confounded by the continual expansion of medicine's evidence-base. The rapid expansion of the scientific and clinical evidence has changed the health care landscape so that no longer is the question how much of medical practice is based in evidence, but rather how much of the available evidence is applied at the front lines of patient care.
One front line of patient care involves the daily visit of a clinician to each patient under he or she's care, commonly termed “rounds”. A clinician, or subordinate clinician, visits each patient and views the current medical condition of the patient, typically, represented by vital statistics and other information contained within paper charts. Commonly, the subordinate clinician must prepare to report the progress of the patient by providing a medical history of the patient and current medical information, with suggested treatments. The “rounds” process is time consuming and complex since each patient will typically have different medical conditions influenced by a large number of different factors, such as demographics, family history or genetic background, occupational influences, and the like. To properly diagnose and treat each patient a clinician and/or subordinate clinicians must understand the nuances of the medical condition of each patient, and respond accordingly to variations in the current medical condition of the patient. Additionally, the clinician and subordinate clinician must maintain his or her knowledge base with the ever-changing medical and scientific knowledge base.
Although clinicians maintain a high knowledge base of medical information, clinician's are human and sometimes may not recognize signals or medical information that suggests a medical condition unrelated to the medical condition for which the patient was admitted. Such error in judgment or misinterpretation of medical information may result in increased patient stay in the medical facility or possibly patient death.
Clinicians are, therefore, influenced by a number of complex and varied constraints during the decision-making process of how to treat a patient's medical condition. Such constraints involve the factors of time, community standards, formal policies and laws, and the issues of reimbursement. Add to these constraints the need to for the clinician to maintain his or her knowledge base with the ever-changing medical and scientific knowledge base, and it is obvious that clinicians attempt to make informed medical decisions under difficult conditions.
It would be an advance to provide methods and systems to aid the clinician in providing an informed and accurate medical decision for each specific patient under his or her care that has a basis in the most current medical and scientific knowledge.